Monday, December 15, 2008

BOULDER, Colorado -- This election season, Saturday Night Live managed to position itself as a must-see program with its smart, topical humor. They had a solid cast to play the election's principals, and the show even added an extra half hour a week with their Weekend Update Thursday segment in the weeks leading up to the election.

The show appeared to be going through a renaissance, but the question remained: how would they handle the post-election hangover?

Well, the past few episodes have shown that the show kind of sucks.

Their first week back after the election clearly illustrated that with a bigger audience, the show was ready to go down market in a big way. Nearly every skit in the Paul Rudd episode was premised on lazy, uninventive gay jokes. I didn't realize dudes kissing was such comedy gold.

Then this past week, there was this travesty:

This isn't an awful impression of New York Gov. David Paterson, who is a very witty, self-deprecating man. He has also been very frank about his checkered past, and I thought the Richard Pryor joke was hilarious. But making fun of the blind? Holding a chart upside down? Wandering in front of the camera? They have done this joke at least three times in recent weeks - once with the crazy woman at a McCain rally who called Obama "an Arab," once with John McCain during the town hall debate, which actually happened in real life, and now this; this time it seems much cheaper and mean-spirited. Apparently all blind people act like Mr. Magoo. I was half expecting him to wander off into a construction site and almost walk off the edge of a metal girder.

Gov. Paterson himself is pretty pissed, and rightly so. His spokesman told the New York Post, "This particular Saturday Night Live skit unfortunately chose to ridicule people with physical disabilities and imply that disabled people are incapable of having jobs with serious responsibilities."

For all of his flashes of genius (Nicholas Fehn comes to mind), Fred Armisen also seems to be the cast member most likely to engage in this sort of uninspired, lowest-common-denominator humor. And why are we supposed to put up with him in blackface? Because he is vaguely "ethnic," or something? Why is that okay, especially when portraying the president?

Since the election, SNL has taken on such difficult subjects as the gays and the blind. What is next for this bold program, Polish jokes? How about they do some skits about various members of the clergy or people of different nationalities walking into bars? Perhaps they could tackle the controversial subject of bathroom-related humor?

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As a couple of former reporters who worked and lived in Russia, we created this blog in response to a worrying lack of expertise and critical analysis in the reporting on Russia by the English-language press. That is why we named the blog after Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter posted in the Soviet Union during the 1930's. He wrote glowing reports about Stalin's show trials and the disastrous collectivization drives. Somehow, these fabrications won him a Pulitzer Prize. So we try to provide our own expertise and opinions about Russia to make sure another Duranty doesn't slip through the cracks. Russia can be a disheartening place, so more often than not, you will find we divert from our original purpose to take up other subjects and causes that are of interest to us - we hope they are of interest to you, too.